How to USE modes!!

everyone knows their modes but no one knows how to use them I remember when I first started getting excited about music when I was a teenager and learning the modes of the major scale I'm feeling pretty smug about myself that I knew what they were however if anyone were to ask me how to use that information apply it to my playing I don't think I would have had a good answer for them I understood what the modes were theoretically but practically in my playing I didn't know how to apply it is this just useless Theory knowledge if you don't know how to apply it it wasn't until years later that I began to understand how I could use some of that theory knowledge practically am I playing and I'm going to try and do my best to explain how I like to think about it you ready okay so theoretically a mode is just a scale and by shifting where that scale starts you you create modes for example a major scale let's take D major the major scale from root no to root note is also called the ionian mode if I play this scale starting on the second note of the scale that is a Dorian mode if I start on the third note of the scale phrygian the fourth is lydian the fifth is mixolydian the sixth is aeolian and the seventh is locrian but you knew that already this applies to any scales so if for example we took the melodic minor scale and did the same thing we'd also create modes for the melodic mine scale now as a slight side note it's probably more useful to learn the formulas for the modes rather than always reference them from the major scale so for example the Dorian mode always has a flat three and a flat seven phrygian has a flat two a flat three a flat six and a flat seven if you're going to practice playing them it's best to separate them from the major scale and play them all from the same root note so for example D ionian and then we've got D Dorian D phrygian D lydian the mixolydian the aeolian and delocrine congratulations you now understand modes theoretically but how is that knowledge useful to you and how would you implement it into your playing understanding chord Theory and how you build chords is such an important part of Music Theory and it's there's so many obvious practical ways that you can Implement that in composing and arranging and improvisation but with modes yes you can play the scales but how would you use them in a performance setting or how do they help the choices you make in what you play okay there may be a time where you play a mode scale within your playing but I think that's more likely you identifying what you've done rather than your knowledge of modes enabling you to do something if that makes sense okay here's a couple of ways that I like to think about using modes practically have you ever come across someone describing a music as having a phrygian sound or a mixolydian sound we in the western world have become so ingrained with the major scale the diatonic sound that we hear in music every day we hear it so much that we don't recognize the qualities of that major scale or the ionian mode has now it's about like when you cook fish at home and you don't realize that you're making the whole house smell of fish because you're inside it and it's building up around you and then you go out and when you come back in you open the doors like cool the house stinks a fish I'm not sure if that analogy Works anyway what I'm saying is the ionian mode has a flavor has characteristics um that we so often don't identify because we're so used to hearing them but all the modes have characteristics so when we hear something that comes from another mode it's really easily noticeable to us because we don't hear it as often now I think the best way to demonstrate this is by using the scale over a pedal note or a drone so from the QFC so my C here is giving you this pedal it's giving you that tonal Center that home point so the moment your ears are waiting to hear what the harmonic context is your ears might be making the assumption that this is the major scale or ionian mode especially if I add a couple of other notes that come from that I think this is your ionian mode [Music] but when I start to add some notes that are outside of the irony mode foreign notice in that flavor so this might you might say this has a phrygian sound this is the sea phrygian scale I'm playing around if I change some notes I might give you now I'm playing a mixolydian sound characterized by that class seven against this backdrop I think it's a really clear way of hearing the differences between some of the different modes so in the same way that the ionian mode the major scale is so Central to Western music there's other parts of the world like Eastern Europe and Asia where the pervasive mode in the music in their traditional music is different to the ionian scale a really fantastic example of this is a guy that I follow on Instagram it's Pages called music rias and what he does is he sings Melodies over a drone and he shows you how he sings them um you've got to watch it it's brilliant [Laughter] it's a really Stark example of the difference between those traditional scales and most that that country's Heritage is versus what we're used to in the Western World definitely go and check him out so some practical applications of this can be used on songs that stay on one chord for a long time so there's plenty of jazz um Funk and Latin songs that stay on like a minor seven chord for ages let's take C minor seven for example code appears in a number of different keys the second chord in B flat major it's the third chord in a flat major it's the sixth chord and E flat major it's the second chord in B flat melodic minor so when I'm improvising over a minor seven chord I've got some options over what scales I can be using Dorian phrygian aeolian Dorian flat two so all this time on a C minor seven chord I've got all these options of what type of C home base I'm drawing from okay and this leads us nicely into the other way that I kind of like to think of implementing this Theory and that's within the realm of Jazz playing jazz generally in western music most of the music that we're used to hearing in the charts is diatonic which means it's predominantly stays in one key all the notes and the chords are reference from a home key Center Now jazz doesn't always stay within one key Center and has a number of chords and notes that will take us out of that key Center maybe before bringing us back and many just Stars use modes as an improvisational device when you're improvising over diatonic changes so chords chord progressions that all stay within one key you can think of this horizontally you can group all these chords that are coming out together and go oh these are all chords from the key of B flat so I'm going to play B flat ideas over these chords so for example the just standard Autumn Leaves the first four chords uh C minor seven F7 B major seven E flat major seven all those four chords are from the key Center of B flat major so I can look at those chords together as one horizontally and group them together and improvise leading between the chords horizontally and lots of jazz tunes though we get substitutions we get key changes we get secondary dominant chords that all pull us out of that diatonic key Center and in those instances it's often useful to think about things vertically rather than horizontally so each chord will have its own modes and scales to draw from for improvising let's have a look at the first four bars of Someday My principal counter just standard Someday my pencil column first courses B flat major seven second chord is a D7 between E flat major seven into G7 the first chord B flat major seven I would use the B flat major scale or the B ionian mode to improvise over and then the D7 at D7 isn't in the key of B flat major so I could use d a mixolydian for that so I've gone from B into D7 [Music] the next is the E flat major seven which I can use the lydian scale for and then G7 G mixolydian that's four choices that I've made for those four chords but if I look at each chord individually I have more than one choice for each chord so for the B flat major seven I might keep that as iron because this is the key Center in the first chord of the song so I'm going to play ionian but for my D7 now I've got options here I to play this as a DMX link or I could play this as a diminished or I could play as a d altered which is a d super lock cream so I've got options I could play as a um I'll play a whole tone scale my E flat I can play that as a I played it as lithium before but I could play that as an ionian the G I've got on dominant chords we have lots of options so like the D7 I've got the same sort of options for my G7 so if I play that as a diminished as if it's like a G7 flat 9 or I could play it as a mixolydian before or I've got um G altered I've got the lydian dominant even on the G but these are all the notes that I can draw from for each scale because I'm thinking vertically I'm thinking what notes do I have above me rather than thinking about the note in relation to the the chord before the chord after and think about what options do I have with that chord in isolation so let's try and simplify what I'm saying here although I guess this isn't simple stuff each type of chord will have a different mode option for you to draw from when you're improvising a simple -7 chord could give you three options Dorian virgin alien and the same applies to more complex chords so when you see it dominant step on the sharp Magnus sharp five you've got the altered mode you can draw from or over a minus seven flat five or a half diminished chord you've got the lock remote to or from or the lock screenshot 2 mode so I think there may be another learning step required to practically apply this mode theory in this way and that's in learning what modes are available to what chord types when I say chord types I mean like a dominant seven sharp 11 or -7 or minus seven flat five or major seven sharp 11. so say I just see a D7 I know that I can draw from the D mixolydian scale but if I see a D7 with a sharp 11 I know that I'm going to draw from the lydian dominance scale the D lithium dominant scale so learning the different relationships between chord types and modes is really useful does that make things any clearer it's quite common to think about improvisation like this in jazz music the tricky thing can be when you first start doing this is making those although you're thinking about each chord in isolation trying to connect the lines in between so that your improvisation sounds like it flows nicely from chord to chord it doesn't sound like you're thinking about something there and then you think about something separately for the next chord you want to try and make your lines connect each other even though you're playing different scales between them so you might be using notes that are common within the chord before and after I remember when I first started thinking like this I found it really difficult to not feel like I was playing a scale over one chord and then a scale of the X chord and to build up lines but that just comes with time the more time you play that will become automatic I think thinking of things in terms of scales is often felt a bit strange to me because we so seldom ever play scales in our playing we're always trying to use information from the scales to to create something melodic or interesting I think that scale application isn't that straightforward I hope some of that might have helped bring some context some ways to implement the theory that you already knew into your player thanks for being here

Channel: Michael Keithson

Views: 107,869

Keywords: music, music theory, music education, theory, modes, modal harmony, modal, education, musician, teacher, educator, jazz, keyboards, piano, learn, tips, tricks, ionian, dorian, lydian, mixolydian, aeolian, locrian, minor major 7, locrian #2, superlocrian, diminished, wholetone, scale, scales, lydian dominant, harmony, harmonic

Id: rV0VCPL4s2s

Length: 14min 43sec (883 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 24 2023